April 30, 2013

With 50,000 diagnoses per year, HIV remains a critical public health problem. To address this, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends that all people, ages 15-65, be screened for HIV. "There's very good evidence that treatment is effective when given earlier, at a time when people are often asymptomatic. So the only way they would know that they had HIV, or that they needed treatment, is to be screened,” said task force member Dr. Doug Owens. Other medical groups, including the US Centers for Disease Control concur with the new recommendations. HIV is most commonly transmitted through blood and semen and, until now, the task force recommended screening only for people in certain risk groups including those who have unprotected sex or who have sex with an HIV-positive partner.

Alert Energy Caffeine Gum from Wrigley contains the same amount of caffeine as a half a cup of coffee, and the FDA is paying attention. The caffeinated gum, available in mint and fruit, contains 40 milligrams of caffeine. If you chew the gum, you'll swallow some caffeine the same way you would if you were drinking coffee, but some of the caffeine will be directly absorbed into the bloodstream via the cheeks or underside of tongue. The FDA is investigating due to concerns about the effects of added caffeine on teens and kids. According to CNN, the FDA has only approved added caffeine in food one time, in the 1950s for colas.

Secondhand smoke exposure can lower teen girls' high-density lipoprotein (HDL) "good" cholesterol levels, find researchers. HDL cholesterol reduces risk of heart disease by clearing excess cholesterol from the bloodstream. The research, published in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, suggests that secondhand smoke exposure during childhood can be a bigger risk factor for females than males. The study involved more than 1,000 Australian males and females aged 17. Researchers found that 17-year-old females who grew up in households where they were exposed to secondhand smoke were more likely to have declines in levels of HDL cholesterol. Secondhand smoke didn't have the same effect on 17-year-old boys.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) significantly improves muscle function for postmenopausal women, conclude researchers. The improvement is evident down to the muscle fiber level, say researchers publishing their findings in Journal of Physiology. The new study is the first one to investigate the effects of HRT at a cellular and molecular level. The study involved pairs of postmenopausal identical twins. Only one of the twins in each pair took HRT, but both had muscle biopsies. According to study leader Dr. Lars Larsson from the Uppsala University Hospital Sweden, "muscles of HRT users showed greater strength by generating a higher maximum force compared to non-HRT users."